When running KVM guests, the Qemu/KVM monitor is a nice interface to interact with the VM and do specific maintenance tasks on. If you run the KVM guests with VNC, then you can get to this monitor through Ctrl-Alt-2 (and Ctrl-Alt-1 to get back to the VM display). I personally run with the monitor on the standard input/output where the VM is launched as its output is often large and scrolling in the VNC doesn't seem to work well.

I decided to give you a few tricks that I use often on the monitor to handle the VMs.

When I do not start the VNC server associated with the VM by default, I can enable it on the monitor using change vnc while getting details is done using info vnc. To disable VNC again, use change vnc none.

(qemu) info vnc
Server: disabled
(qemu) change vnc 127.0.0.1:20
(qemu) change vnc password
Password: ******
(qemu) info vnc
Server:
     address: 127.0.0.1:5920
        auth: vnc
Client: none

Similarly, if you need to enable remote debugging, you can use the gdbserver option.

Getting information using info is dead-easy, and supports a wide area of categories: balloon info, block devices, character devices, cpus, memory mappings, network information, etcetera etcetera... Just enter info to get an overview of all supported commands.

To easily manage block devices, you can see the current state of devices using info block and then use change <blockdevice> <path> to update it.

(qemu) info block
virtio0: removable=0 io-status=ok file=/srv/virt/gentoo/hardened2selinux/selinux-base.img ro=0 drv=qcow2 encrypted=0 bps=0 bps_rd=0 bps_wr=0 iops=0 iops_rd=0 iops_wr=0
ide1-cd0: removable=1 locked=0 tray-open=0 io-status=ok [not inserted]
floppy0: removable=1 locked=0 tray-open=0 [not inserted]
sd0: removable=1 locked=0 tray-open=0 [not inserted]
(qemu) change ide1-cd0 /srv/virt/media/systemrescuecd-x86-2.2.0.iso

To powerdown the system, use system_powerdown. If that fails, you can use quit to immediately shut down (terminate) the VM. To reset it, use system_reset. You can also hot-add PCI devices and manipulate CPU states, or even perform live migrations between systems.

When you use qcow2 image formats, you can take a full VM snapshot using savevm and, when you later want to return to this point again, use loadvm. This is interesting when you want to do potentially harmful changes on the system and want to easily revert back if things got broken.

(qemu) savevm 20130419
(qemu) info snapshots
     ID        TAG                 VM SIZE                DATE       VM CLOCK
     1         20130419               224M 2013-04-19 12:05:16   00:00:17.294
(qemu) loadvm 20130419